The Mingrelian (7 page)

Why was he risking his life and the lives of his family and friends by playing spy with Iranians? It had started innocently enough, and now he had no choice. His family’s future was at stake. It hinged on his definition of family.

Intrigue and conflict had been a fact of life for Mingrelians for a thousand years, and it would be no different now that it was Lado Chikovani’s turn. Leaders of a small principality at the crossroads of Europe and Asia must be agile and clever. A Mingrelian prince worked with the Turks to undermine the occupation of the Persians; a later prince appealed to the Russians to expel the Turks, another abdicated and became Russian aristocracy when Georgia was annexed by the Czar. Mingrelians embraced socialism when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, and Joseph Stalin, a peasant from Gori, Georgia, rose to control all of the Soviet Union with his chief of the secret police, Lavrently Beria, a Mingrelian. Georgian culture is at the core of Russian literature and music, and Mingrelians are at the core of Georgian culture.

Lado threw back another vodka and covered a cracker with a piece of smoked fish. He looked out through the windows at the street as he took it in one bite.

A small principality on the shore of the Black Sea has an outsize influence in the world because Mingrelians actively contribute to Georgian culture and commerce, but Mingrelians marry Mingrelians, honor their history and traditions, stick together, and speak a second language only they understand.
Lado considered as family anyone who could trace their bloodline back to the 17th century, honored the traditions and taught their children Mingrelian. He was their point man, the prince who would ensure their survival and success into the next generation. It was his turn on the hot seat.

“Fight when you can win, hide when you can’t,” his father had told him. A simple rug merchant tolerated by the communists as a cultural necessity in a far-flung corner of the empire, he’d been the Godfather of Old Town in Tbilisi. He colluded with uncles and cousins working within the Soviet machine to ease the advancement of fellow Mingrelians during a 70-year Russian occupation. Hiding within the system, and with those contacts, the family had prospered. When the Soviet Union faltered, it was Mingrelians who led the overthrow of Russian domination in Georgia. And the first president of the new Republic of Georgia was Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a Mingrelian.

Chapter 15: The Rug Shop

’m going to have a look over here,” Boyd said to Bud Weidman as they made their way down Erekle II Street in the Old Town section of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. As the aircraft commander, Bud had insisted they stay together on any shopping trips. He had the responsibility to keep aircrew members out of trouble when stopping in foreign cities. They’d been told the rug shops were on this street, and they all wanted to look for that special Asian rug for their homes. Half a dozen crew members, all in casual civilian attire, ambled down the street in a gaggle, taking pictures, laughing, sampling the food carts and generally looking like the tourists they were.

Boyd had been given a specific address, just down the street from an old church they’d stopped to photograph. The Mingrelian had been very specific. He wanted a contact with no connection to the CIA or the embassy, and he wanted to know the actual identity of that contact, and to see a picture, both formal and some snapshots. When told his contact would be one of the pilots of the embassy rotator, the Mingrelian had agreed and insisted he have the embassy run schedule so he’d know when Boyd was in town. It had all been posted on that secret webmail account set up just for him. Boyd felt naked as he crossed the street and entered a rug shop. His instructions included that he must buy a rug, and use his credit card.

A bell on the door alerted two young women in modern Western attire giggling in a back corner behind a stack of rugs. One had a loom across her lap, and both were tying knots on a
red and blue rug while they talked and watched something on a smartphone. One called to the rear in a tongue Boyd didn’t recognize.

“I want to buy a rug,” Boyd said as an old man came from the back of the shop.

“Yes,” the old man nodded at Boyd, pointing to a display area surrounded by stacks of rugs. His eyes searched Boyd. He nodded again and said something to the rear.

A woman said “Yes?” as she came through the curtain, some papers in her hand.

Boyd was stunned. He’d never seen a woman so beautiful. He’d heard of “Circassian beauties,” describing peasant women of the Northern Caucasus along the Black Sea coast; the legendary beauties of Ottoman harems and European opera houses. He’d seen pictures of the Georgian dancers in their traditional dress, with their perfect creamy skin and startling deep, dark eyes. But this woman exceeded all that.

“Uh, um, a rug,” he said, embarrassed at being embarrassed.

“We have lots of rugs,” she said, eyes laughing, smile breaking out. In a moment, the awkwardness had become their private joke. She knew him. He knew it. The younger girls in the back were already back into their teenage world, and the old man was gone.

“Something like this,” he said, pointing to a mostly dark red, 4-by-6 rug on the top of a stack nearby.

“Pakistani; cheap,” she said as she pulled it off the pile and tossed it toward the back. Her eyes challenged him. “Be a buyer,” they seemed to say.

“I want something authentic for my home, something worthy of my journey,” Boyd said. That sounded a bit formal, but consistent with a buyer’s attitude.

She smiled and nodded, leading him past the stacks at the front to one nearer the rear.

He picked up the top rug, a darker, almost plum-color red with a tight geometric design.

“Bokhara, from Turkmenistan,” she said. “This one is from the Soviet period; well made but standardized.”

He nodded and she pulled it from the stack and set it aside. He found another, a brick-red with a less intricate but brighter design.

“Armenian, from Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Interesting, but not well made.”

She enjoyed being tested. The store had a thousand rugs, and no two were alike. Did she know every one? He looked closer. She remained the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, flashing eyes that defied color description – sometimes brown, sometimes green. The light played games with them, and the eyes played games with him. Her hair was deeply brunette but not jet black, with a few single strands of gray.

“Your English is very good,” he said, mainly to look directly into her eyes and have her do the same.

“It should be, I studied in London.”

“Rugs?”

“London School of Economics. Banking,” she said, like he’d served what he’d thought would be an ace and she’d slammed it back.

And there was shape. She wore a black full skirt with a dark blue blouse open at the neck, and no jewelry. He dared not look below her chin.

“Something local,” he said, dragging his attention back to the rugs.

She threw off several rugs from the top of one stack and came to a brightly colored but mostly red geometric rug a bit smaller than the Bokhara, with a looser weave. She looked at it a moment, then spread it on the floor.

“Borchali. It’s from the Kazak area in southern Georgia, not as fine as that Bokhara or a Persian, but typical of the area, well made and unique.”

“I’ll buy it.”

“You didn’t ask the price,” she said, eyes teasing him again.

“Oh, yes, how much?”

“For you,” she paused, looking him up and down, “five hundred dollars.”

“Oh, I want a deal.”

“OK. Four hundred eighty dollars,” she laughed.

“Done.” He pulled out his wallet and handed her his MasterCard.

She grew serious looking at it, and then looked at his face again.

“Do you have a photo ID?” A hint of fear crept into her eyes.

He produced his brown, official U.S. government passport. She looked at it quickly, holding it down away from the front windows, and then handed it back to him as if she wanted it out of sight. She walked to the cash register at a nearby counter.

“There you are, Chailland!” The front door flew open, and Bud Weidman and the whole crew barged in like it was all a raucous fraternity party. “We thought you’d been abducted.”

“No, just buying a rug,” he said, signing the paper receipt. The woman had folded his purchase into a square and was stuffing it into a plastic bag.

“Whoa, you found the right store,” one of the crew said, leering at the clerk, then at the two high school girls in the back.

“She doesn’t speak English,” he said. He didn’t want this crowd to spend the day looking at rugs. This was serious business.

“Well, we need to get going anyway,” Bud said. “I think we’ve about maxed out the plastic for this trip.”

Boyd turned to the woman. She spoke a long sentence in Georgian, and while the crew watched her over his shoulder, she pressed a flash drive into his hand, then handed him the large plastic bag with his rug in it.

*****

Ratface also was on Erekle II Street. He had shaved his beard and wore dark glasses. He sat in the back of a café, watching the street, pretending to read a paper. He wore a cellphone earpiece. The aircrew passed. He took no notice.

“He’s coming,” the phone crackled.

Ratface was waiting for Lado Chikovani. An assistant was stationed across the street from Kartvelian National Bank on Kote Afkhazi Street waiting to follow Lado, then hand him off to Ratface.

“He’s coming your way, just like you predicted,” the phone crackled. Ratface paid his bill and stepped into the street, smiling in satisfaction. Lado was a vodka drinker. Just as Ratface paced his afternoon around 5 o’clock prayers, vodka drinkers pace their day around 5 o’clock vodka. Erekle II Street was blocked off into a pedestrian mall just beyond the rug shop Boyd and the crew had just left, and a half-dozen restaurants and bars were on that street. There was no hurry. Lado would be there. Infidels are so predictable.

Lado Chikovani crossed Erekle II Street and glanced down toward his father’s rug shop but continued into the next block and slipped into a quiet restaurant. Ratface was a block behind.

Entering the restaurant, Ratface spotted Lado in the back. He was seated with another man. If that man was Eskander Khorasani, he’d have his traitor. Khorasani had been in Tbilisi
for a decade. Though he’d been very successful as a banker and money launderer for Iran, there is always a whiff of suspicion when someone has lived the good life away from the strict rules of Islam. It was time for 5 o’clock prayers. Ratface stood and went to the toilet to wash his hands, passing closer to Lado and his contact. He could see the man clearly in a mirror. It wasn’t Khorasani.
Ratface passed near the table and went to the men’s room, washed his hands and returned to walk by Lado’s table again, confirming his companion wasn’t Iranian. Then he left.

“That last shipment emptied our storage tanks in Batumi. The next one will load from Poti,” the Georgian finance minister, Lado’s fellow Mingrelian, said with a chuckle in the Mingrelian dialect.
They hadn’t seen Ratface.

“Twenty-five million dollars-worth of oil is a lot of oil,” Lado said

“The Iranians want to do it again as soon as possible, so they must be happy with the price.”

Both men laughed and downed shots of ice-cold vodka.

*****

The sun was just breaking on the horizon as Boyd lifted the nose of the C-130 halfway down the runway and followed the standard departure route to the east.
T
hey had visited the embassies at Yerevan, Armenia, and Baku, Azerbaijan, before stopping at Tbilisi and spending the night. Now they had 600 miles to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, then another 600 miles to Tashkent, Uzebekistan, and another overnight. Tomorrow would be Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and Almaty, Kazakhstan, before an overnight at the U.S. base at Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The following day would be all flying, 1,500 miles at a chugging 300 knots back to Incirlik, Turkey, with all the diplomatic bags from the week and whatever passengers wanted to tour Central Asia
in return for bypassing Customs and Immigration on the airlines. None had, so far. That left one day each week for unexpected delays, or training if there were no delays. Boyd would be in Tbilisi one day a week.

Who was that woman? He saw her face in the side window as he looked out at the Caucasus Mountains looming to the north, snowcapped already in October. Was she the Mingrelian? Hard to believe such a vivacious young woman, so full of life, would be mixed up in nuclear weapons and the threat of imminent war. Was she married? She hadn’t worn a ring. Those laughing brown-green eyes twinkled in the window as he flew down a green valley along the railroad and pipeline to Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea. She knew who he was; she knew everything. He knew nothing. She had flirted, just with her eyes. Or was she just being friendly, to close the deal?

“Coffee?” Bud asked, unsnapping his seat belt and getting up. They were at 25,000 feet and on autopilot. Baku was just sliding past, and the Caspian Sea spread out before them.

“Yeah, black. Thanks,” Boyd said, still lost in thought. Just then the radio crackled in his headset, and he responded to a direction to change altitude from the Air Traffic Control Center in Baku. Air-traffic controllers watch all traffic, untangle routes, and guide aircraft around weather and altitudes that have reported turbulence.

The Caspian Sea had a green tint to it, dotted with oil platforms and sectored by pipelines, snaking out of the water and onto the land converging on the pumping station at Sanachal, south of Baku. Off to his right, to the south, he could see the coast of Iran.

Boyd had put the flash drive into a box and the box into a bigger box and affixed a diplomatic seal. It was one of a stack in the back. From Incirlik, the other Little Rock C-130 would
take the diplomatic mail to Germany, and a C-17 would get it back to Washington in a couple of days.